Posted
by
samzenpuson Friday May 30, 2014 @05:37AM
from the let-us-do-that dept.

jfruh (300774) writes "Amazon is pushing hard to be as ubiquitous in the world of cloud computing as it is in bookselling. The company's latest pitch is that even your highest-performing databases will run more efficiently on Amazon Web Services cloud servers than on your own hardware. Farming out your most important and potentially sensitive computing work to one of the most opaque tech companies out there: what could possibly go wrong?"

Amazon Web Services can be found on the list of Linux Foundation patrons [linuxfoundation.org], which means that they help to assure that open source projects get the appropriate funding that they sorely need. I don't know about you, but that's a big plus in my book.

So true. Takes all the fun out of everyone on slashdot saying exactly the same thing in response to the article.

The procedure is; Throw the red meat out in front of the rabid dogs -- pull hand back. You put an article out and your hands is at all still on it -- the dogs chew on you.// But all kidding aside -- YES, articles should be submitted without bias -- or with as little bias as possible. This is how we should get our news, and this is how we should start debates. It's just the reality that on Slashdo

I personally find it interesting how Slashdot was so Pro-Cloud when it came out, then when RMS did some rant about it they almost all changed their minds overnight.

As with any new approach or technology, you need to look at the good and bad. The fact that there is a trade off to a different approach doesn't make it bad, it comes down to is that trade off worth the benefit.For some people yes it is. For a lot of people the risk of not having control of your hardware is worth the value of lower upfront cost

People, "cloud computing" is nothing but a rather thinly veiled mix of software as a service and server hosting, ok? The reason why we needed a new word for it is that the former had a very bad rep by now (and it fully earned that rep), and the latter is anything but edgy and cool anymore.

Could we, at least here, avoid the whole marketing lingo? It may be "cloudy" to markedroids and management, but I guess we DO know here that the data is not just put "somewhere in the cloud", right?

"Somewhere in the cloud" is as much as I need to know about the cloud services I use, that's kind of the whole point. Products don't get named for their underlying implementation they get named for their user-visible attributes. "Combination of SQL host, file server and front-end interface with best-effort backup protocols" doesn't quite have the same ring to it as "cloud computing", and it takes longer to say.

But Dude! How will we proactively leverage our infrastructure emplacement in world-centric roll-outs, and obtain niche market ubiquity? We're not going to do that with mere synergy based breakthroughs in the cloud!

"cloud computing" is nothing but a rather thinly veiled mix of software

I'd disagree with that pretty strongly. It can be that, but if you're using it for what it was really designed for then it's much more than that. Let's say you're a startup and you have no idea how your product is going to catch on. In the old world you'd have to buy or lease server capacity for what you anticipate your demand will be. In the cloud world, you just pay for enough to keep the system running at current demand levels, build your solution to scale horizontally, spend half a day configuring

wait till growth of new customers stops and the players start to figure out ways to squeeze more profits from current customers. they over subscribe servers now, but wait a few years and see how bad it gets. and when you call support they will just blow you off and tell you it's your app that's not compatible with a hyper visor or whatever

That still doesn't make it something that needs a fuzzy description. It STILL is a server housing service. Scaling very easily to meet demands, yes, but it still is the same old deal it was a decade ago.

What remains of it is that 9 out of 10 times whenever someone wants to put something "in the cloud" it actually means "I have no idea how to realize that". Call a spade a spade and say what you mean. Trying to be vague is not what I need when you try to describe what you WANT.

It's definitely not the same as it was 10 years ago, not even close. 10 years ago we literally had server housing services, AWS can be that but it is also much more. Yes, part of AWS involves hosting servers, but AWS is a complete platform with its own toolset. And that's just talking about EC2. If you look at the other services there was nothing even remotely close on the market before them. Nothing like S3, RDS, Elasticache, Cloudfront etc existed in a form where it was available to everyone. Used to

And I mean "my", "fucking", "dead" and "body" literally. I already imagine telling one of my customers that I host their data on Amazon AWS. I will never have had that good an opportunity to study people's backs.

Seems Amazon and Google see the writing on the 'internet wall'.
Their core products/services are not going to bring them anymore revenue than what they get now, and can shrink further when nimble competitors or new ideas happen. So the only way is to branch out.
Google thinks it will be driver-less cars, automation, internet balloons, thermostat etc., while Amazon thinks it will be AWS, cloud and so on.
Surprisingly both these behemoths are not branching into life sciences. May be no has made good impressive power points yet.
The one company terribly lost is Apple. They are buying into an arthritic rapper!!!

Amazon is not going after Apple, they are going after IBM. Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are the leaders in this space, and are hitting reliability and scalability metrics that are pushing the old models out of business.

Bloomberg had a great article this month on how IBM is losing *government* contracts (its bread and butter) to AWS.

Companies always expand (sometimes to the neglect of their core products) because it feeds investor interest in the possibility that there's still profit growth in the company. If google stopped making cool things and still held like 85% of the ad market, the company's stock performance would in turn be tied pretty solidly with the ad market, which one would assume doesn't grow much above inflation, so not a great investment. So, companies expand into areas where they can convince the market that they're di

Seems Amazon and Google see the writing on the 'internet wall'. Their core products/services are not going to bring them anymore revenue than what they get now, and can shrink further when nimble competitors or new ideas happen. So the only way is to branch out.
Google thinks it will be driver-less cars, automation, internet balloons, thermostat etc., while Amazon thinks it will be AWS, cloud and so on.
Surprisingly both these behemoths are not branching into life sciences. May be no ha

Seems Amazon and Google see the writing on the 'internet wall'.Their core products/services are not going to bring them anymore revenue than what they get now, and can shrink further when nimble competitors or new ideas happen. So the only way is to branch out.Google thinks it will be driver-less cars, automation, internet balloons, thermostat etc., [...]

You forget that when Google launched their IPOthey told everyone that Google would be spending money on stuff outside their core services,that it wasn't necessarily going to be profitable, and to deal with it if you want Google stocks.

There aren't many publicly traded companies who can basically say "I do what I want and you agreed to it."Not that it matters, since the stocks are structured so that the founders always retain voting control.

Even though about 80% of what Snowden "leaked" is hyperbole meant to stir up shit? After listening to the interview [nbcnews.com] I'm convinced that a ton of this information is utter crap. "ooh I'm a spy" "ooh I was trained by the CIA" Does the NSA have a bulk collection program? Yes. Do the US Federal Courts screw us over on privacy issues? Yes. Do the FISA courts represent a black hole in the justice system? No more than the IRS' Tax Courts but both are invalid "justice" systems meant to screw over Americans. W

You say "hyperbole" and then go on to make a point about Google and Huffingtonpost getting all the information there is about people -- so how is it Hyperbole to assume that the NSA isn't getting at least as much as Google?

You're not defending the practice of Google or the NSA -- you're saying "Everyone is doing it so what is the big deal?"

It's not hyperbole if it is true and if you want a Constitutional Amendment -- which I don't think is necessary when we already have an Right To Privacy our Supreme Court

It's not hyperbole if it is true and if you want a Constitutional Amendment -- which I don't think is necessary when we already have an Right To Privacy our Supreme Court ignores.

Uh, wait, what? I'm sorry, can you show me where in the constitution it says you have a right to privacy? The Supremes created that right (I don't believe in natural rights, sorry) which they said the other amendments wouldn't work without, by ruling that the constitution implied it. In fact, we do not have an explicit right to privacy in the constitution. If we did, that would really help support some of the other amendments as well, and would have saved us a lot of trouble.

Comedy and tragedy are just two sides of the same coin, that's what the masks are all about. The idea of the US constitution was to create a government with powers distributed among the states and without a centralized military...

Yes, that's what I just said. Too bad reading between the lines is considered to be a useless skill these days. Let me help you. The federal right to enslave a nation trumped the states' rights to enslave individuals. But both statists and federalists were slavers. When you have no moral high ground, then you cannot win the people. That's why the nation was divided.

Guess who won.

The wealthy landowners who run this country, the only ones with a real vote. That's why you always hear about Greece being the birthplace of dem

A quick glance over your recent posting history shows that you have nothing to contribute whatsoever. All you do is bitch and complain about what other people say. You're the opposite of B-Real in Cypress Hill. Instead of standing behind people shouting "Yeah!" you stand behind people and shout "I'm an idiot!" Well, that's what we hear, anyway.

Looking at your posting history, you obviously think what you say is important..

Looking at your moderation history, obviously no one thinks what you say is important.

you probably like the sound of your own voice as well.

Not as much as other people do. One is supposed to sound lower in one's head, I sound higher. But people tell me I have a radio voice all the time. At least they don't tell me that I have a radio face.

The point is you're getting spied on by a lot of organizations, not just governments or their agencies. That's a fact, not hyperbole. If everybody suddenly became astonished when Snowden leaked a bunch of shit, then we have a bunch of people around the world who have been living in a fantasy world. Sure the Snowden affair has put a new light on the subject, but lets face it this shit has been going on for decades and even the EU in the 90s recognized the fact that spying on citizens was going on.

also

You're not defending the practice of Google or the NSA -- you're saying "Everyone is doing it so what is the big deal?"

Any law that makes collection of terrestrial citizens information from external sources makes all this pretty much moot. Who says Canada, UK, hell Russia snoops on Americans and sells back Canadian,UK,Russian, etc.. citizen's data back with a swap? The US would turn a blind eye to it if it meant getting around pesky laws and such.

Following the Snowden revelations your NSA inspired dream of cloud computing and total social networking (i.e. full access too all the data in the world) is dead.

Nobody with a brain would even think of storing their data on an American computing resource.

Sincerely yours,

The rest of the world.

Dear World,

Following the Snowden revelations your Marketing Techdroid inspired dreams of cloud computing and total social networking (i.e. full access too all the data in the world) is dead. Did you not notice the stories of how your countries / companies were complicit? If "Multinationals" in the USA rolled over, when for all intents and purposes, they own our politicians -- is it too much of a stretch to think they WANT the pervasive spying? The question to ask is; "What do multinationals get out of knowi

Nobody with a brain would even think of storing their data on an American computing resource.
Sincerely yours,
The rest of the world.

I think you over-estimate how much the 'rest of the world' cares about that when the cloud lets them look at pictures of their friends. When profits are to be, had companies don't care about privacy; when it gets in the way of what they want right now, consumers don't care about privacy.

Yes, I'm sure Amazon can run my database more efficiently than I can. But what are they going to do when I need to fetch 100 megabytes of data from a table and I want it in less than 30 seconds over my 20 megabit/s internet connection? Hmm?

Everybody that uses external hosting for applications that use databases (I refuse to use the c-word any more) also uses it to host the databases they rely on, as it is a basic principle that you need to minimize network latency in this scenario. Having an application talk to databases thousandss of miles away running over anything but very expensive dedicated fiber would be a Very Bad Idea.

OK, Amazon probably handle the install and basic configuration for you, but how difficult is this for a DBA? In my ex

The amount the SLA covers is pathetic to the actual harm downtime can cause. Even with a industry leading SLA if you are spending $10k a month and get less than 99%, you might get that full $10k back. Too bad you lost $100k (or more) thanks to that downtime. Good luck getting that additional $90k back.

So yes, it is nice that they will offer a refund for performance under a certain level, but when you expect a high, usually VERY HIGH, profit margin on this process, recouping costs is nice but far from

Of course Amazon wants your money. They're a business trying to make a profit. There are plenty of things people can complain about when it comes to Amazon or to any of their competitors in this arena, so why do people keep complaining that Amazon is trying to make a profit for itself and its shareholders?

That's excess profit. That's like saying you didn't make any money last year because you spent it all on a house and a boat.Amazon is making plenty of profits. It's just spending them on expanding so it doesn't actually post profits but if you lookat it's total net worth you can see that it is still growing every year.

Okay, maybe your post (if it was yours) wasn't a complaint, but I have seen this complaint time and again when it comes to companies like Amazon, as if we should expect big companies not to try to make a profit for their shareholders (which would be considered negligent). I think there are many more important things to be worried about (privacy being the most obvious) before people are concerned about capitalism being capitalist.

I am glad to see companies and individuals succeed, be it monetarily or otherw

A m3.2xlarge costs 4905.6 per year. You can buy a 32GB RAM 8 CPU core Dell R320 system for $2,666.80 in it's entirety. Literately you are spending nearly twice as much to use AWS. And this is before even taking into account the cost Amazon charges for bandwidth.

You are omitting the cost to admin, care and feed the hardware. That is AWS's selling point - what happens if you want to use it for your program / project that only lasts a short period of time? What if you got the scale wrong? Reliab

1) What happens when your single server goes down? How long does it take you to get back up and running?
2) What happens if your demand is spiky?

If you're going to use an instance for a year constantly, you need to look at reserved instances. That brings the price down to $3054 for the year which is not bad as you don't pay for electricity or cooling.

1) I guess it goes down until it can be fixed under warranty (same or next day depending on purchase option). Redundancy is expensive. What happens when your single instance of AWS goes down with an "oops amazon is having problems with a datacenter" message?
2)Good job, you have identified why Netflix uses AWS.
3) Reserved instance is cheaper, but at that price still more than a dedicated server and the server typically comes with a 3 year warranty and will likely last past that (Dell will warranty for 6 ye

1) I guess it goes down until it can be fixed under warranty (same or next day depending on purchase option). Redundancy is expensive.

With Amazon's multi-az, redundancy just costs double whatever your non-redundant primary server costs (or less). Less if you don't mind your backup server being a bit smaller. Getting true hot-spare failover working properly on a database server is a royal PITA. The fact that Amazon will happily sell it to you for $250/mo. is a steal, and far cheaper than actually doing it yourself would be for any significant project.

1) I guess it goes down until it can be fixed under warranty (same or next day depending on purchase option). Redundancy is expensive. What happens when your single instance of AWS goes down with an "oops amazon is having problems with a datacenter" message?

Well i guess the same thing that happens when the datacenter that my 1U server is colocated in goes down -- I either bring up the server n a DR region (which I can set up nearly for free with AWS), or wait until the datacenter problem is fixed. In the past 2 years, haven't experienced a single multi-AvailabilityZone outage with Amazon, and only 2 short single AZ outages that resulted in no loss of service since my servers are split across multiple AZ's. I've never had to fail over to the warm-spares in a s

1) I guess it goes down until it can be fixed under warranty (same or next day depending on purchase option). Redundancy is expensive. What happens when your single instance of AWS goes down with an "oops amazon is having problems with a datacenter" message?

If your acceptable downtime is measured in days, then yeah, you should buy your own hardware. For me, if Amazon sends me an email that my instance is running on degraded hardware, I can clone the instance and remap the IP to the new one. Total downtime is a few seconds.

Bringing up a new instance in a different AWS availability zone is always an option, or a different region if an entire region is down (rare).

Also, I do have spiky loads for the project that I'm working on and I shut down the instances when I

If you do the math, you are going to be paying for that server, CPU, RAM, OS, disks, and such, either by having the box physically located at your site, or you will be paying for a similar server in one of Amazon's racks. For ranges of weeks, AWS is fine. For constant load, might as well have the server in house and at least pay lip service to Sarbanes-Oxley or PCI-DSS3.

If you're truly in a PCI-DSS situation, the last thing you want is to have your server in house. Now your datacenter has to be fully compliant with the PCI physical access guidelines. It'd be a lot easier to lease one somewhere like Rackspace, which is even more expensive than AWS (who provides one of the few cloud environments that's PCI level 1 certified at this point).

A m3.2xlarge costs 4905.6 per year. You can buy a 32GB RAM 8 CPU core Dell R320 system for $2,666.80 in it's entirety. Literately you are spending nearly twice as much to use AWS. And this is before even taking into account the cost Amazon charges for bandwidth.

AWS is best used in time frames of weeks, not months or years.

Try justifying a few thousand in hardware expenses for a 2-week project. Then you might see where the value lies in spinning up hardware within hours at AWS for short-term demands.

OS upgrades, backups, hardware support contracts (which aren't cheap for good response time), and of course the SysAdmin to keep it all running. Gee, I just love how you sell your Dell solution as "cheap" while omitting all of these expenses. Reminds me of Oracle sal

We just did a 3 year reserve on a few instances, it makes the cost about 1/3 the price of their on demand. Sure the cost on paper is still a bit more than dedicated for hardware alone but the chances of hardware failure, internet outages, etc has a way higher chance than AWS going out. We ran servers internally for years and switched to AWS 3 years ago, we would never go back to running internally again.Basically I think it boils down like this - small to medium sized businesses "cloud computing" is probabl

Yes, but what if you actually want to turn it on? Then you have to pay for electricity and batteries and a generator and redundant A/C. Or if you want to connect it to the Internet reliably? Then you have to pay for multihomed Internet service. If you want it to be highly available then you have to pay for a data center to house it and probably another one for DR. If you want disk to go with it then you have to buy disk, and you have to figure out exactly how much you're going to need because if it tur

same with AWSthe storage is extrathe networking you pay for data per MB or GB in and outyou pay for backupsyou pay for DR in different availability zonesyou have to pay more in your office internet access to get the faster access to access your data

You're paying for storage either way but in AWS you don't have to try to figure out the max storage you'll need. Figure you design a system with a 3-5 year lifetime, so you need to know how much storage you'll need over that period. I don't know about you, but that's pretty hard for me to do. Plus, what happens when you do a major software upgrade and you want to retain full offline backups of everything for a couple weeks, effectively doubling of tripling your storage footprint during that time? The f

That's partially true...US East is actually comprised of many different availability zones, each of which is self contained and housed in a physically separate data center. So, US East isn't going down, particular AZs go down from time to time and the way Amazon names them makes it exceedingly confusing to narrow down what's actually failing. us-east-1a for me may not be the same AZ it is for you. AZs are defined on a per account basis, so it just makes it easier to say the region has issues when technic

That is AWS's selling point - what happens if you want to use it for your program / project that only lasts a short period of time?

I used AWS for 3 weeks for a Data Science class. My bill was $1.92.

What if you got the scale wrong?

Buy more bandwidth processing power? You start off small and as you need more, you buy more. And if you need less, change you plan. It's nothing like buying hardware where once you buy it, you have to deal with equipment.

Reliability and Redundancy?

It'd be hell of a lot better than what I could do with Dell's in my own space.

A m3.2xlarge costs 4905.6 per year. You can buy a 32GB RAM 8 CPU core Dell R320 system for $2,666.80 in it's entirety.

If you are comparing with a fixed purchase, you should use the 3-yr reserved price for the M3.2XL, which is $162/month ( includes the initial payment ). This gives you a yearly cost of $1944. And that includes all NOC costs.

If you do not factor in NOC costs in your estimate then you clearly haven't been doing this very long.

I used AWS for a few projects for my research. I would upload a data set to AWS run the MapReduce jobs and then analyze the output in AWS. Once complete, I'd download the results and shutdown the whole environment. I could programatically spin up the whole environment in about an hour or so.

Yes I can buy it, but then you need to include hardware installation price and hosting price.

And if the Amazon computer hosting my vm dies, the system will just boot up on a new computer and restart the vm, without me even knowing it. With the dell I would have next day business service aka far to much down time.

The reason the company I work for uses vms(Not from amazon however) is that if there are hardware problems we just reboot, and if there are to many problems with our host, all we have to do is a dns

AWS has been a blessing for our company. It is WAY cheaper and way more reliable than running something in house. We have 5 servers running that ends up being only a little more than what we were paying to run 2 servers internally (factoring in time to manage hardware, outages etc). We had way more outages running locally than we do with amazon. We do have quite a few "short" projects that is great for spinning up a server for a couple months then killing it

We also had no problems with AWS pricing. Our problem was with their performance.They are not set up well for high io database applications.We switched to solid state drives on stormondemand(aka liquidweb) and have seen a 10 fold increase in performance.I prefer liquidweb's model as I can even opt to pick the exact specs of my machine but I still have all the samecloud features like spinning up a new instance or changing the size of an instance with a click of the button.To me stormondemand is the best of both worlds. Oh, and the best part is that I can actually talk to someone ifthere is a problem.

I am curious on using SSDs for high IO databases. Do you worry about the massive amounts of read and write on more full drives or does stormondemand balance your data so that drives are not writing over the same block enough to hit the upper limit? Increase in performance makes perfect sense but integrity of the databases is something we always debate (I work on multiple large, high IO RDBMS) whenever talk of using SSDs comes up.

They are mirrored drives and we use a journalling filesystem and take good backups.We haven't seen any issues yet. Unfortunately that's one place where cloud is lacking.Even though stormondemand offers mirrored drives and bare metal servers, to myknowledge there is no way for me to actually check the raid status of the server.

A software RAID implementation like ZFS is superior to hardware RAID (it has a far higher standard of integrity and flexibility designed in), and you can monitor it however you wish. You can run it on cloud services.

Yeah, in theory, "the cloud" is suppose to handle the failures transparently (and/or never fail) but Ifind it harder to trust hardware and backups procedures that I can't physically see or test.It would be very easy to create a virtual server which falsely claims to have full raid and geographicredundancy, etc... but without the ability to actually test a drive failure or a datacenter failure you arereally just trusting the 3rd party to be honest and to perform due dilligence as usually their contractsstate

Some of that is new. When I last checked they only offered enterprise support. At a minimum of $15k/month that's well outside of our budget.I'm glad to see that they are now offering cheaper plans but when you're only running a half dozen servers even the business plan is pretty expensiveand a 1 hour response time is pretty slow when other services like liquidweb and rackspace give me a faster response time and more personalizedservice for free. From what I can see with both their support packages and t

> It is WAY cheaper and way more reliable than running something in house.

No, it is not. Either you're a terrible shopper, do not do metrics, or are mischaracterizing your usage. AWS is about twice as expensive as alternatives with instability at the node and service level. They are ok for elastic needs and decent for prototyping (when you make a new account you get that free year of micros).

Scalability is not just for the enterprise. In AWS you can feel safe starting with a $15/month setup, knowing that you can always move to the $100/mo plan if the workload changes. When buying hardware you do not have a similar liberty. It is either buy more than you need, or risk having to buy again.

If you're using AWS as a replacement for a dedicated machine, then you're doing it wrong. Even then, your comparison is disingenuous, because you're not costing in rack space, cooling, power, and so on in your purchase price.

The point of AWS is if you need to spin up a few (or a lot of) instances quickly and use them for short periods. How long does it take you to buy and rack that Dell system? If you can get it in under 2 days then your admin staff are incredibly impressive. If you can get it in a w

We are using AWS for our startup. Our bills are around $2200 a month. $1700 of that is a charge to have dedicated instances instead of shared. this gets us 6 servers - 4 small 2GB RAM web servers and 2 4GB ram DB servers (in reality what we need at the moment, we can scale the DB later when we bottle neck).

We've done the math ourselves and in reality we could probably save some money (face value) or buying servers ourselves and colocating them. But, then you have to add in the maintenance costs, a part t

You can also deduct the full cost of your "lease" as opposed to depreciating the hardware investment over 5 (3?) years. Because we have an outsourced, throwaway, service-based economy/society, the government makes it compelling NOT to invest in infrastructure.